Criminal Queers
Chris Vargas Eric A Stanley
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Criminal Queers visualises a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex, working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
A discussion about what is at stake in the performance of realness and the practice of passing, and how they are both acts of survival and resistance.
A glance at both analogue and digital processes; the clarity and precision of digital colour or the yawning, endless depth of dye and emulsion, our programme celebrates how both approaches revel in colour, saturation, hue and tone.
Laser beam sine tones used to draw delicate, abstract patterns by vibrating charcoal, placed atop of a great strip of paper running through the gallery; beautiful, fragile sound-created autonomous drawing.
Some of the most breathtaking, delicate and smoke filled guitar playing this side of Loren Connors or the quieter sides of Keiji Haino.
Can we use sound, repetition and difference to personally and collectively engage with space, time and labour?
How might two of the great musicians working within contrasting traditions of freedom collaborate? What might this produce: musically, socially, allegorically?
Radu plays a trombone, Klaus creates pure sine waves: they sound on their own, or sometimes together and often with considerable space and silence.
Black-clad with an ominous aura created by their distorted guitar epics, burnt-out ballads and raucous mantric jams.
Repetitive, mesmerizing rhythmic workouts, to pieces of stark and rigorous introspection, where notes picked and slid in isolation, scatter like mercury around the listener.
A poetic multi-screen performance about “the inadequacy of the arbitrary passing moment and the impossibility of permanence”. About time and change.
A changing pool of people (40 or so at a time – artists, audiences, etc) talk for 90 minutes in a simultaneous series of open-ended round-table discussions, structured like speed dating, and mixed live as both a concert and for radio broadcast.